I'm working on a couple of hacks right now. The first is a
patch to Nautilus to allow file-deletion , moving of files
to the trash, from the Music View. I found that with the
various mp3's I download from napster or gnutella, I quite
often end up with incompletes. With a Music View that
allows you to delete files, you can easily hear if the song
is complete or not and then optionally delete the file.

The other hack which I haven't started yet, but I want to
soon, is an importer for gnome-cal calendar data into
Evolution.

Unfortunately my extra time is limitted lately.
Hopefully that will change soon.

Well I've been working recently on a Perl irc bot, smeg.
It's an interesting way to pass time. We're in the process
of moving a lot of persistent data to a SQL backend. Eimi has been
investigating PostgreSQL and MySQL. Smeg is getting
pretty advanced. He speaks on topic, utilizing a rather
large database of quotations (originally based on the
fortune packages). He also gets information from the web
and of
course has some preprogrammed responses. He has a mood and
and affiliation to individual users based on their karma.
He keeps a hierarchy of objects and how they relate to each
other which provides him with a basic understanding of the
universe. He can tell your fortune, give you news headlines
(/., LinuxToday, and lwn.net daily).

We'd really like to do more to separate the "engine" (such
as it is) from the implementation. The ultimate goal is to
make him seem more human-like, while providing some cool
bot-like functions which can be hidden. To that end he will
spontaneously do things such as mark himself away for
various reasons (depending on his mood, which isn't
arbitrary--it's based on how users treat him), speak
spontaneously, etc. Admins of Smeg have remote control over
him. He plays cards (52 games to be precise), keeps a
calendar and watch which can affect things he does which are
time or date specific and admin-definable. He will give
definitions of words, perform web-queries, and serve a damn
fine beer (if he likes you). I shit you not.

Well Gnome 1.4 is finally out the door. Now we can begin
looking ahead to what needs to be done for Gnome 1.4.1 and
Gnome 2.0 development. I wish I could be at GUADEC right
now, but alas, I was unable to attend, so I'm very anxious
to hear from those who did attend. Magic always happens at
GUADEC.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.